The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel eBook

On Wednesday morning when Mr. Bowlsby came down to
the bank he was slightly surprised at seeing the young
cashier at his accustomed desk. To Mr. Bowlsby’s
brief interrogations then, and to Miss Mildred Bowlsby’s
more categorical questions in the evening, Lynde offered
no very lucid reason for curtailing his vacation.
Travelling alone had not been as pleasant as he anticipated;
the horse was a nuisance to look after; and then the
country taverns were snuffy and unendurable. As
to where he had been and what he had seen—­he
must have seen something and been somewhere in eight
days—­his answers were so evasive that Miss
Mildred was positive something distractingly romantic
had befallen the young man.

“If you must know,” he said, one evening,
“I will tell you where I went.”

“Tell me, then!”

“I went to Constantinople.”

Miss Mildred found that nearly impertinent.

There was, too, an alteration in Lynde’s manner
which cruelly helped to pique her curiosity.
His frank, half satirical, but wholly amiable way—­
an armor that had hitherto rendered him invulnerable
to Miss Mildred’s coquettish shafts—­was
wanting; he was less ready to laugh than formerly,
and sometimes in the midst of company he fell into
absent-minded moods. Instead of being the instigator
and leader of picnics up the river, he frequently
pleaded bank duties as an excuse for not joining such
parties. “He is not at all as nice as he
used to be,” was Miss Mildred’s mental
summing up of Lynde a fortnight after his return.

He was, in fact, unaccountably depressed by his adventure
in the hill country; he could not get it out of his
mind. The recollection of details which he had
not especially remarked at the time came to him in
the midst of his work at the bank. Sometimes when
he turned off the gas at night, or just as he was
falling asleep, the sharp, attenuated figure of the
ship-builder limned itself against the blackness of
the chamber, or the old gentleman’s vacuous
countenance in its frame of silver hair peered in
through the hangings of the bed. But more frequently
it was the young girl’s face that haunted Lynde.
He saw her as she came up the sunny road, swinging
the flower in her hand, and looking like one of Fra
Angelico’s seraphs or some saint out of an illuminated
mediaeval missal; then he saw her seated on the horse,
helpless and piteous with the rude, staring men about
her. If he dreamed, it was of her drawing herself
up haughtily and saying, “I am the Queen of
Sheba.” On two or three nights, when he
had not been dreaming, he was startled out of his slumber
by a voice whispering close to his ear: “I
know you, too, very well. You are my husband.”

Mr. Bowlsby and his daughter were the only persons
in Rivermouth to whom Lynde could have told the story
of his journey. He decided not to confide it
to either, since he felt it would be vain to attempt
to explain the sombre effect which the whole affair
had had on him.